User talk:Juliesimmon


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Coordinates work
Hey, Julie, thank you for the coordinates work. I became aware of it because of this expression of concern at EAR. I checked four of your changes at random and they look great with one minor, niggling point: This isn't a rule, but the best practice here is not to be overprecise. You can read the details here, but my rule of thumb (and I also do quite a bit of coordinate work) is simpler: just use the maximum precision needed for the crosshairs on a mapping system such as Acme Mapper or Wikimapia to not indicate an ambiguous location. That's, frankly, a lot easier to control if you use decimal coordinates rather than DMS ones but then tell the interface to convert them to DMS. For example:

The format=dms bit causes them to display in DMS even though they're stated in decimal. For a city you might be able to cut down the precision (I'm not going to actually try this on this example, so it may not be enough in this case) to a single decimal place: -37.0|174.8. If you're pointing at a specific house, on the other hand, you may need to use 4, 5, or 6 decimal places to avoid ambiguity, though 4 is usually enough. One other suggestion: If the article has the same coordinates in several different locations (in an infobox, in a tag at the bottom, sometimes buried in the text, etc.) consider also trying to get them all into a single reference, usually at the bottom if there is no infobox or in the infobox if there is one (and strip them out of the text if they're at one or the other of those places). If they're in an infobox, set up the syntax so that they'll display in both the title and the infobox out of that single reference. Depending on the box and how you enter the coords, that can either be a line of the infobox instructions or a display=title,inline tag in the coord tag. Again, thank you for your work improving the encyclopedia. Best regards, TransporterMan  ( TALK ) 22:12, 6 March 2014 (UTC)